Gyo OVA Review: Don’t Waste Your Time

When adapting something like Gyo, the inevitable must be asked: Do you play it completely straight faced without a hint of irony, or do you throw a few winking nods to the audience in subtle ways? Apparently Ufotable’s approach was to imitate the most clichéd of disaster flicks and show the whole thing with hardly any intentional comedy, opting for the former method. And let it be said right here that so much went wrong… but I can’t entirely blame the studio for crapping out what they did.

For those unaware of Junji Ito’s short manga, Gyo details the invasion of dead fish on mechanical legs as they overrun land and begin inflicting all kinds of delicious body horror on the unsuspecting public. The story was as goofy as it was creepy, never allowing itself much time to take itself seriously. After all, there are only so many sea creatures you can stick on four spindly metal legs before a degree of credulity on the audience’s part is lost. On one hand, the designs of the creatures and the plot itself was as unsettling as the best of Ito’s other work, but on the other it bears the unintentional comedy that also plagued the likes of Uzumaki; if Ito ever learns to draw a surprised expression, a great gift will have been lost. It certainly doesn’t help that the second half was as unnecessarily convoluted as could be, not really building to anything good.

At least the manga didn't have anything like this.

So naturally, if somebody wants to adapt a horror manga, Gyo probably isn’t the best choice unless the adaptation in question is a horror/comedy. Right away Ufotable shoots itself in the foot, giving itself a nasty gangrenous infection in the process, by not taking advantage of the overall tone of the story. But if it were just an issue with tone, this adaptation could still be considered good. After all, the source material didn’t seem to be able to settle on a consistent tone, and that was pretty damn enjoyable.

For the first half, you could consider it nothing but a campy disaster flick and likely wouldn’t be too far from the truth. The fish scuttle along on their legs, giant sharks eat multiple people, and there’s even a scene with tentacles for the clichéd fetishist in each of us. While there’s some unnecessarily shoehorned in drama and several liberties taken with the source material (Main character’s a girl on vacation with her friends, doctor has a much less prominent role, there’s a videographer seemingly out of nowhere), these scenes are interesting in their own bizarre, unsubtle way. But of course we have to remember that there’s a second half to accompany the first, and this is where things start to go from enjoyably bad to simply mediocre.

The plot follows that of the manga without deviating too much, but there’s too much crammed in with too little context. For instance, the circus scene felt awkward enough in the manga, but at least it was given more than three minutes of a man speaking in intermittent broken English. That’s all we get in the OVA, and then it’s promptly forgotten about never to be brought up again, as is everything else that precedes it. Something ran out, and I’m not sure it was just the budget.

Most of which I'm sure was allocated to this scene.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to get worked up about in general. The OVA does what it does and quietly passes from memory, not leaving much of an impact one way or the other. There’s not much more to say that hasn’t been said already elsewhere; the character archetypes are extremely broadly drawn and seen in virtually any disaster film ever, the added drama is unwelcome, the animation veers between being kind of good and being utter shit, and there’s just little to recommend in general. It’s a boring hour-long distraction that I can’t in good faith even recommend as a spectacle. There’s so very little to draw from the source material that works well on screen that Ufotable can’t be entirely blamed for the result, but this will likely go down as one of the worse choices that the studio’s made.

To pithify it into something short and sweet, the Gyo OVA offers little that the manga hasn’t already done better. It bummed me out more than anything, actually, so I think I’m going to eat some ice cream and forget it even existed.

Most of my problems were with the second half, which I hope I got across in a clear fashion. It tried to cram too much from the manga into thirty minutes with very little of it having any effect. Actually, the first wasn’t much better, but at least watching walking sharks eat people never stops getting boring. I’ll admit that if it ran a little longer, it might have been better.

The manga did better than the Anime in some regards, but still did not like either one. Ufotable is an okay studio, but their are just specific projects they can and not do. This would be one of them, but I doubt anyone else could do better. Did not even bother covering this. Pass some ice cream my way :p

Yeah, Gyo isn’t Ito’s best work by any stretch of the imagination, and I doubt anybody would’ve really pegged it much better than this. But still, there were some legitimately bad design choices that were too difficult to overlook with this adaptation.

The first half is campy enough to be worth watching, but it tries to shoehorn the character development in at the end when it really has no place. If you’re desperate to watch this, stick around for the first 20 minutes or so and you’ll have a good enough time.

I agree with most of what you’re saying, especially how it needed to be longer. Though, I think it’s definitely one of the better Ito adaptations even though it was arguably one of his weaker stories. His stuff is just hard to put into any other medium other than manga.

Another thing I’m curious about is why they bothered to adapt this one. Enigma of Amigara Fault would have been much easier to make an OVA of. Does Gyo have a much wider appeal in Japan? I’m not entirely knowledgeable on how the anime adaptation industry works… or really the industry itself does as a whole.

I’m as confused as you are as to why they adapted this of all of Ito’s works. Don’t get me wrong, it was still entertaining for the first half, but it’s too reminiscent of something you’d watch late at night on Sci-Fi, down to the phoned-in character developments.

It’s just one of those things that doesn’t work well outside of its medium, and I’m fairly convinced that it’s because in manga he doesn’t have to make his characters emote.

The emote thing is one of the reasons. Another is because his stories are just so weird. If you try to make a synopsis for any of his mangas, they sound like they’re either from an Ed Wood movie or 1930’s pulp horror magazine (though, in away, his inspirations do come from the latter). Another thing is his art. The level of detail is really what strikes fear into the reader, not entirely the story/plot. Granted the stories/plots are disturbing, they wouldn’t be nearly as chilling if it wasn’t for his visual style.

Personally, I think this is the best adaptation of any Ito work we will ever get. Gyo wasn’t good but it definitely wasn’t the Uzumaki movie. Man, don’t even get me started on that one…

Definitely agreed. His visual style isn’t very well suited for animation and film; I’d hesitate to call it too “distinctive”, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it. With that said though, I think we could get a good adaptation out of Amigara Fault if it was handled with delicacy.